I was about to turn and ask the Professor’s disembodied head floating next to me when a wide beam of bluish-white light was emitted from the bottom of the ship straight into the water below. With the boxes in the way in the center of the ship, I couldn’t see the exact source of the light, but I saw what happened when it hit the water.
The beam seemed to vibrate violently for a full minute, and I heard a sound like a tuning fork, sending all the sea life zipping off as fast as their fins could carry them. I turned to the Professor to ask what was going on.
“Just watch,” he said before I could even voice the question, a hand reaching out of his projector and pointing down at the water.
A thin, red laser beam shot down the middle of the vibrating white light and hit the ocean, causing the already warm-looking water to bubble as if boiling. Without warning, the pilot's cockpit dropped from the central navigation column, through the bottom of the ship, and into the water, yanking the rest of the ship into the ocean with a great splash. As if drawn by a magnet to the ocean floor, we started sinking - fast.
Chapter 5: The Big Flush
I looked around in alarm but the Amazons only sat, chatting about animals and seeming unconcerned as seawater gushed in around us. Though the pilot's cockpit was now outside the bottom of the ship, I still couldn't see the others through the empty navigation column. It was as if the ocean was sucking us under, filling the ship with warm seawater through thousands of holes that had appeared in the hull.
The Professor took my panic in stride. “It’s okay, Sunny. Remember what we talked about earlier,” he said calmly. “Take deep breaths until we go under, and then blow all the air out of your lungs,” he instructed.
“What?” I exclaimed. Maybe you should have made a point to pay attention when he was talking, the little voice at the back of my mind whispered.
“Stop! What are you people doing? Are you nuts?” I was yelling now over the noise of the rushing water. Myrihn and Teague turned to stare as if I was the one who was crazy, but they still weren’t doing anything. I tried to see Sensei across the ship, but the darn central nav column was in the way.
What was this? Some sort of cult, and I was supposed to die quietly with them? The bath-warm seawater was now up to my chest and rising fast. I struggled to get free of my harness.
The Robot projected his hands underwater, put them over mine, and emitted a glowing, mini-force field. It felt like heavy rubber, stretching a bit, but keeping me from being able to open my harness or reach in my pocket for my Leatherman to slice the straps.
“Sunny, look at me. Look at me!” I looked even though I didn’t want to. Everything inside me was screaming to get out of there; the water was up to my neck now. His image was getting wavy, projected through the water.
“You will be fine, you have to trust me,” he said. I took one last deep breath and held it as my chin went under. “It’s very important that you blow all the air out of your lungs when we go under.” I shook my head frantically, salt water stinging as it splashed into my eyes. “You won’t be hurt, just do what I say!” And with that, our heads went completely under.
I held my breath as I looked around at the others, bubbles rising from their mouths. This was crazy! What if I couldn’t survive that way? He motioned for me to breathe out. I shook my head, my cheeks puffed out like a bullfrog’s, and my eyes felt like they would bug out of my head any moment. He motioned more urgently now, looking down through the clear hull as we were approaching the sea floor, finally putting his hands over my shoulders and giving me a shock. The brief jolt forced the air from my lungs in a rush of bubbles just as the magnetic pull became a thousand, no, a hundred thousand times more powerful.
We ripped through the soft sand of the ocean floor as if it wasn’t even there and entered a darkness so complete, so extreme, it was like all light had been sucked out of the world. I quickly lost all track of time and wished futilely for my old waterproof Snoopy watch with the glowing hands.
I was going to suffocate - again! How long had it been? Half an hour? More? My heart hammered in my chest. How long could I last before I passed out and sucked in a lungful of saltwater? My eyes burned and my lungs started to ache, begging me to take a breath.
After what seemed like forever, the central nav column moved back up into place inside the ship and we popped up to the surface like a cork. The walls that made up the top half of the saucer rolled down like car windows, allowing the water to gush out. The ship’s engines hummed again, lifting us above the choppy surface so the remaining water could drain from her hull as if through a colander.
I took a deep breath of the fresh air now surrounding me, hoping to clear my head and slow my racing heartbeat. The wind blew through the hull and across my wet clothing, making me shiver, but when I took another deep breath into my lungs it was only a weak imitation of the air on Earth. I automatically started to breathe faster, sucking in lungful after lungful with no real benefit. The breeze coming in through the windows felt refreshing and cool, but tasted stale and stagnant. The Robot heard me gasping.
“Take your hood off, Sunny,” he said wryly. I did as he said and felt immediate relief as my hair soaked up the sun’s rays coming through the now clear-as-glass shell of the saucer. I noticed that everyone else had taken their hats off too and were now fluffing long tresses in the sunlight. Myrihn, Teague, Sensei, the pilot – everyone I could see had long hair, some curly, some straight, all green. The shades varied, from darkest evergreen to bright new spring grass.
I did a double take as the Robot’s shaggy brown mop suddenly turned vivid emerald in an effort to fit in. Even though my hair was dyed black, it was working, like I was breathing in through the hair shafts and out through my mouth. My hair worked! It actually worked!
“Unpleasant, isn’t it?” the Robot said with a look of distaste. At first I thought he meant the air, but… he didn’t actually breathe. I looked at him in confusion.
“The wormhole,” he clarified.
A wormhole. So, that’s what that was. Unpleasant had to be the understatement of the year, even for the Robot.
“You know, another minute of you holding your breath like that and it would have been much worse. Don’t you remember me telling you that air expands in the wormhole?” I shook my head. “Well, I did.” He rolled his eyes. “I’d appreciate it if you would listen to me next time.”
I didn’t reply. I’d appreciate it if he would tell me important things when I wasn’t freaking out about leaving my whole life behind.
The windows and holes in the hull closed once more, shutting out the breeze that was cool on my wet track suit, while we hovered, slowly now, over land. I focused on how nice the sun felt on my left side… my right side. It felt like there was sun shining on every part of me, soaking into my skin and sucking in through my scalp with a warm tingle.
Confused, I looked around at the pale purple sky above and immediately saw not one sun, but two. One was larger than Earth’s sun, but not as bright and distinctly reddish. The other seemed tiny in the sky, a daytime star so bright white that it bleached the lilac sky surrounding it.
Macawi was part of a binary star system, I remembered now. But I guess that was one of those things I had to experience for myself. My muscles felt relaxed and energized at the same time, as if the sunshine flowed through my hair to run through my veins like warm syrup.
It was really a miracle that Macawi could support human life at all in a binary star system, but then life on Earth was a miracle too. On both worlds, everything had to be just right; temperature, atmosphere, the very makeup of the air and water, all had to fall within very narrow parameters. Both somehow managed the insane feat of supporting human life, but there the similarities ended.
It wasn’t long before the ship came to a halt, still hovering in the air - and the bottom literally fell out of the ship.
The crates that had been stacked so neatly tumbled out and a ringing clang reverberated through the air as they
hit metal a short distance below. Teague and Myrihn calmly grabbed long, hooked poles off the wall and jumped out the trapdoor on either side of the falling boxes. I gripped the edge of my seat, thankful now for the harness that strapped me to the wall.
Teague and Myrihn now stood on the top edge of a huge metal shipping container sitting below us, shoving at the cargo with the long poles to fit it all back together like building blocks. It wasn’t their method of packing that had me staring, but rather that they jumped into, out of – and over – the ten-foot-high steel box like it was nothing.
I couldn’t see anything special that they were wearing, no jet packs or spring shoes. And it wasn’t truly like jumping. They seemed to sort of fuzz out and then zip to their destination, like they were on extreme fast forward for a millisecond. Obot the Robot was watching me with the closest thing to amusement on his face I think I’d ever seen.
“How are they doing that?” I asked.
“They phase,” he said with a shrug, as if that explained it. “Some people here develop that ability… others never do.” His lips pursed as if he disapproved. “It’s the two suns. Combined, they give Macawans energy that doesn’t exist on Earth.”
“So… I might be able to do that?”
Another shrug. “I wouldn’t count on it. It’s tied to the chlorophyll, our ability to absorb energy.” He looked at my hair with my green-streaked brown roots showing. “You’re deficient.”
I made a face at him. “Gee, thanks.”
After all the cargo was unloaded, the saucer moved away and landed. Everyone still aboard unbuckled their harnesses to stand and stretch in the energizing rays of the suns streaming through the hull. I wanted to scream ‘let me out of here!’ but I waited – impatiently - with everyone else to exit.
Chapter 6: The WorldPort
I hadn’t seen the ship undisguised before. Like something out of an old B-grade sci-fi movie, it was conical on the bottom half and rounded on top. It gleamed like brushed silver from the crisscrossing of scratches and gouges it had probably gained over many, many trips through the wormhole. It was supported now by a tripod of skinny legs, like ants supporting a rhino.
I looked around and saw that we’d landed in the middle of nowhere, the tarmac I stood on so cracked and worn in spots that it was down to dirt. The suns glinted off shiny buildings off in the distance. Why didn’t we land closer to the terminal? Now we’d have to wait for a bus or something.
I immediately wished for the sunglasses buried somewhere in my bag. In addition to the two suns, I saw three pale moons in a cluster near the deep purple horizon. Did that mean night was falling, or that it was still early morning… or neither one? My warm-ups, which had been heavy with water a few minutes ago, were already almost dry now. Was it this hot here all the time, or was it the equivalent of high noon in mid-summer? I had no way of knowing. I shook my head in bewilderment and tied my jacket around my waist, engulfed in a strong feeling of being adrift with no way of getting my bearings.
“Sunny! Hurry it up.” The Robot’s voice got my attention after a few minutes. I had been numbly watching the bustle around me. “They’ll be here for you any minute.”
I looked over at Sensei. She was standing apart from everyone, observing me and my reactions. She came over as I offloaded my bags.
“Sunny, you’re going to have to ask a lot of questions.” I nodded, but hesitated. “Don’t worry about looking stupid. Anyone who doesn’t understand has never had to throw out all of their background knowledge. You have to allow yourself to start from scratch.”
I swallowed. “What time is it? What time of day, I mean,” I whispered.
“It’s 1230 hours. Twenty-two hours in a day, remember? Not so different from what you’re used to. Stick to military time and you’ll be fine.” I nodded. Okay, so it was early afternoon.
“Is it always so hot here?” It must have been about ninety degrees. “What time of year is it? Where are we?”
“Remember your geography,” she said patiently. “We’re on the shore of the Great Sea of Tethys at the north pole of the planet. This is where the main port is for shipping and travel between planets.”
I envisioned the globe that Professor Obot had projected in our lessons and started to calm down. “In winter it’s completely frozen over, right?”
“Right. It’s high summer now and this is about as hot as it gets... here. Do you remember where the Kindred is?” she asked.
“Yes.” I took a calming breath and tried to allow what had been useless classroom theory to become reality. “It’s just south of the equator, southwest from here. North of the Great Desert.” She nodded. “It’s winter in the southern hemisphere now… no, no, that’s Earth. It’s summer there too, because of the two suns, right? And it should be hotter. Ugh.”
“Yes. Not many people choose to farm south of the equator anymore, but our people have never been ones to give up. It’ll be hot, but what you’ll really notice is the dryness. Drink a lot of water and don’t forget the sun block.”
I nodded absently.
“So, that thing,” I began, “that… wormhole. Is that what happens when people get lost in the Bermuda Triangle?” I asked. A normal person would drown if they went through that.
“In the past, yes. Professor Obot!” she called across the pitted tarmac to him. “Would you come show Sunny the bone yard, please?” She gestured to a building in the distance.
He grumbled as he hovered his way over to us. “Such a waste of my polymorphic programming.”
“Now our pilots are all trained to check for air and sea vessels so that none are caught and dragged in when the wormhole opens. These days, if Earthans go missing there, it’s most likely foul weather or some sort of accident. Either that or people are staging a hoax for the tabloids.”
The Robot hovered next to me and projected a field, round and wavery at the edges, that zoomed in on the distance like a camera. I saw a run-down building with a sign that read: Quarantine.
“Quarantine?” I asked. “We don’t have to go there, do we?”
“No, no,” Sensei answered. “That’s mostly for when people leave the planet. Look next to the building.”
I saw a big fence that looked like it went on forever in either direction and… “A scrap yard?” I asked.
The Robot snorted. “Yes, but what’s in the scrap yard?”
From where I stood it looked like a giant pile of splintered, twisted metal. “Um, rusty scrap metal.”
“Pieces of old planes and ships that were caught in the wormhole, Sunny,” Sensei said. “There’s a small memorial there too.”
“Oh.” I felt like I should say something else, but didn’t know what. “Who are those people on the outside of the fence there?” They seemed angry, waving their fists in the air and chanting.
Sensei took a look through the view screen. “Afflicted rights protesters. They’re not allowed past the fence line.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a disease, Sunny. The polite term is the affliction.”
“What, are people here scared that they’ll catch it?”
“No. They don’t bother chlorophyllated people like us. Mostly the National Council wants to prevent them from getting off-planet to Earth.”
“Ohhh. But they can’t want to spread their disease to Earth. Can they?”
She looked around and cleared her throat. “The Afflicted claim that they’re not contagious and should be allowed to travel like anyone else.”
“Oh. Well, if there’s a chance of them spreading some new disease to Earth, I don’t think they should be able to go.”
She gave me a wry smile. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t keep them from trying.”
“So, what does this affliction do?” I focused on them through the Robot’s zoom screen. Except for the anger, they looked healthy enough, not about to drop over dead or bleed out through their eyes or anything.
Sensei glanced around as if uncomfortable answering in fron
t of the others before finally saying quietly. “It makes them go insane, Sunny.”
“Oh."Okay, that would be the worst disease ever; one that hijacked a person’s brain and made them do and think things they wouldn’t normally. I watched the protesters for a minute, glad they were so far away. “They don’t look crazy,” I said, then kicked myself. How exactly do crazy people look, Sunny?
“That’s the problem,” she replied. “They don’t seem to show outward symptoms until they go off their medication, and then it’s too late.”
“Oh,” I repeated, not knowing what else to say. Through the view screen the Robot was still projecting, sighing every few minutes as if very put out, I noticed someone who looked vaguely familiar standing a short distance apart from the group of protestors. He lowered the rectangular device he held, and I recognized the smallish man from the entrance of the karate tournament the other day, except today, his spiky hair was the bright, almost fluorescent green of new grass. He grinned at me, as if he knew I was watching, and disappeared from sight behind the quarantine building.
“Hey! That-,” I began but stopped when several oddly shiny human-shaped figures exited the quarantine building and zipped, phased I guess, toward us, kicking up a cloud of dust in their wake. Watching on the Robot’s zoom screen, they looked like they were speeding right at me.
I jerked backward in surprise and tripped over my own feet, landing on my butt in a dusty pothole. Three short people who, like my duffel bag, seemed to be shrink-wrapped from head to toe, arrived full-stop right in front of us, wearing goggles and masks over their noses and mouths. I got up and brushed myself off, embarrassed to hear everyone laughing around me, including John and his father who were standing a short distance away from the rest of the group with their bags. No one else had moved an inch or seemed the least bit alarmed.
It was hard to tell what the lumpy figures looked like under their wrapping as they popped open their cases and each removed some kind of strange weapon I may have seen before on Star Trek. Two of the three surrounded me and I stumbled back again with my hands up in front of me.
The Faarian Chronicles: Exile Page 5
